Secondary Characters
A few weeks ago I took out a scene that I felt wasn’t sitting right in my story. It felt purposeless and that it wasn’t progressing the story and was rather catty–basically not being true to the story nor the characters.
Then I sent the chapters surrounding the missing scene to my critique partners and they were all up in arms with comments that were along the lines of what the heck happened? Why did you lead up to this scene, skip over it all together and then sum in up in a sentence later on? How did this rift happen between these two characters? What? What? What?
Ah crap. It wasan important scene! So, I dig through old versions and pulled the scene back out and plunked it back in, adding another three pages to my already big manuscript. And reading it afresh, I realised that it was important to the story and it was true to it–whether I liked it or not. The scene showed the rift begin between the heroine and her boyfriend as well as the beginning of the heroine identifying her inner strength and pulling on it in a time of need.
So, the scene is back and everything makes more sense again. Strangely enough, I learned something about myself as a writer with this scene. I think the real reason I originally took this scene out is that it has a secondary character being mean to my heroine–who I loved dearly. I came to this conclusion when I did an edit when I was plunking the hated scene back in, because when I was done, I was a little pissed. I was grumpy! So I sat back and thought, why is this? It can’t be the peanut butter cookies I just ate. Well, it is because I HATE the secondary character that I created. Seriously. She is a mean, conniving bitch that ensures that she illustrates how my heroine doesn’t fit in at a party. I disliked her somuch and the way that she made my heroine feel, that I eliminated her without realising what I was doing to the story. So now, The Bitch is back and is as mean as ever. Well, for her one scene…then I give her the awful boyfriend back. Ma-ha-ha. The rest, as they say, is history.
